by Walther Ploos van Amstel
The attraction to urban areas means that new houses and workplaces are needed. Building new houses or renovating older housing stock is a natural way for a city to evolve. However, the end products of construction projects are produced at their place of consumption. This means that a multitude of materials and resources need to be …
Urban Consolidation Centres (UCCs) are often conceived as an enabler to alleviate negative effects associated with distribution of goods in cities, such as traffic congestion and hazardous emissions. UCCs not only have the potential to reduce these effects but also provide alternative distribution solutions by introducing new transhipment points.
Urban consolidation centres (UCCs) are a popular measure in city logistics. However, many UCCs strongly rely on government subsidies and are granted a short life because of their inability to reach financial sustainability. Despite the interest from both the practitioners and the research community, there are a limited number of quantitative contributions that investigate the …
To increase the benefits of a UCC in city logistics, the delivery to the final customers from the UCC can be done using light electric freight vehicles. These LEFV provide numerous operational benefits due to their smaller size while being more sustainable than regular light commercial vans.
City logistics will become more complex and costly. The demand for city logistics grows because of urbanization. Most urbanization takes place in emerging economies leading, amongst others, to the rapid emergence of highly dense megacities. Research by Vrije Universiteit Brussels (B) looks at alternative urban freight options for deliveries to megacities
With construction having started in the spring, the Paris multimodal logistics centre will be opening its doors soon. Fleet Street reports about it: We used to think that they were unwelcome in town centres, driven once and for all into more or less distant suburbs: however, logistics facilities are making their come back in the very …
Due to growing urbanization, fragmentation of freight flows, and increasingly strict delivery conditions, cities around the world have to deal with a vastly increasing number of freight transport flows. Carriers are unable to efficiently bundle these flows, resulting in inefficient urban transport. This inefficiency contributes to negative environmental effects such as hazardous emissions, traffic jams, …
The European project SUCCESS – Sustainable Urban Consolidation CentrES for conStruction – delivered a report on business models for construction consolidation centers. This report is very useful to organise suitable Business Models for the implementation of logistics hubs for city logistics by the construction industry.
Collaboration is standard practice in many supply chains, yet transaction costs often make it too expensive even so. Countless blog posts talk about the need for collaboration in the transport sector, in wholesale, in retail and with web stores.
Countless books and articles have been written about urban distribution centers, logistics decoupling points, city hubs and urban consolidation centers. Every self-respecting European city has been the scene of such initiatives – the one more successful than the other, but all highly subsidized in any case. What can we learn from those initiatives? The best …